APPLICATION: How To Train Your Dragon - Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III
This application has been ACCEPTED.
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Juli.
LOCATION/TIME ZONE: Florida/EST.
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Not Applicable.
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III.
SERIES: How to Train Your Dragon (Film; some information drawn from the book series).
RESERVED: No.
WISHLIST: No.
PERSONALITY: Hiccup is kind of a snark fairy. He's sarcastic and has a sense of humor drier than the Sahara, though it's largely in his own defense. See, he's kind of spent the better part of his life feeling like nothing more than an annoyance and a failure to the entirety of his village. His family, what would be his friends, even the sheep probably rolled their eyes at him fairly regularly. But he's okay with that, for the most part-- he'll just roll his eyes back and spat some sort of sardonic reply and wander off to doodle trees in charcoal. Inwardly, Hiccup hates being a burden, but given his physical strength, or... very stark lack thereof, and lack of brutish thought process, he's sort of resigned himself to his fate of being the Worst Viking Ever. Despite his resignation, he spends tireless hours and days and years of his life trying to prove himself to the village-- more than anything else, he wants to be accepted. He hides it pretty well, for a kid severely lacking in affection and attention, but he does have a habit of acting out.
...and by acting out, I mean he regularly (accidentally!) sets the village on fire trying to show his dad he can be awesome.
That said, the kid does have a fuse. It's a very slow burn, but he does get frustrated and he will snap at people, it just takes the better part of forever for it to actually happen. He's very loyal, despite the cold shoulder he receives in return for his loyalty, and he'd never hesitate to help someone out if he thought he actually could. Given most Vikings don't need help unless they're being chased by an army of angry Gronkles, Hiccup rarely has the chance to help his fellows out. He puts in a good amount of help working at the blacksmith shop in the village, though-- he's been an assistant to Gobber the Belch since he was little (littler), and while most of the tools the Vikings in the village use are easily bigger and heavier than Hiccup himself, he's a pretty good hand at the smithy. He's very creative and inventive, and while he tends to get an irritated eyeroll out of his fellow Vikings for it, he's attempted to compensate for his inability to use traditional Viking weapons by creating devices to help him. This proves that not only is he a tactical thinker, but he's good at turning his artistic impulses into useful, if only to him, creations.
Likely due to the fact that he's spent the majority of his life as such, Hiccup is something of a loner. He doesn't dislike people or companionship-- quite the opposite, actually --but he's awkward and not-quite shy and sure as hell doesn't know how to behave if people actually decide he's worth their time. This is most noticeable when he starts excelling in Dragon Training and the other Viking children start idolizing him and paying attention to him-- he almost never stays with them and holds a conversation, he tends to duck away and find an excuse to not deal with the clamor. This could be blamed on the fact that he had a dragon to take care of and dragons are a million and seventeen times cooler than two-faced Viking brats, but more likely is due to the fact that even though he's sought after the attention of his fellow Vikings for years, Hiccup doesn't really know what to do with the attention once he's started receiving it.
It's hard to say that Hiccup dislikes himself-- he certainly doesn't have very high self-esteem, but he's not outright self-hating, either. He doesn't hesitate to snark at himself in a self-deprecating fashion when he does something wrong-- or "wrong" in the eyes of his village, at least --but he's not an emo kid. He rolls with the punches amazingly well, taking things like being told his father doesn't hate what he looks like, but what's inside of him with little more than an irritable sulk and a sarcastic remark. This is why his sarcasm is his defense-- rather than let such comments hurt him, he bounces them off with a roll of his eyes and something dry and vaguely witty and moves on. He's... an oddly sensitive teenage boy, but constantly bleeds sarcasm so it's hard to tell unless you can see through it and figure out what he's actually trying to say.
TIMELINE: Post-Movie. (:
BACKGROUND: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is the son of Stoick the Vast (O Hear His Name and Tremble, Ugh Ugh), Chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe of Vikings that reside on the frozen little island of Berk. According to Hiccup, Berk is "twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death", as well as "located solidly on the veridian of misery". Which is to say, it's a frozen rock in the middle of a frozen ocean. His village has been standing for seven generations, buuut because they're constantly plagued by dragon raids and attacks, all the houses and buildings are new. Because what is having fireproof building supplies. The dragon raids, in fact, are what introduce the plot and pretty much everything to the story. See, Berk has for about three hundred years had problems with pests. Large, flying, fire-breathing reptilian pests, in fact. They raid the village at night and steal food, and instead of leaving the village, the Vikings just... fight and kill the dragons and tend to get half their village destroyed on at least a weekly basis.
Hiccup is sort of the village idiot, except reversed. Whereas most of the Vikings are stubborn and stupid and too deeply-rooted in their traditions to think logically or change anything in their ways, Hiccup is... different. For starters, he's tiny and scrawny and not at all strong, he can't wield any of the weapons the other Vikings use effectively, and he's just strange. His father claims he has the attention span of a sparrow, and once when he took Hiccup out fishing the boy went hunting for trolls. Hiccup is also the blacksmith's apprentice, so during dragon raids he is only ever really allowed outside if he's on his way to the smithy. Because if he's outside otherwise he winds up being part or most of the reason that half of the village winds up in flames.
Which, after actually shooting down the rarest and most intelligent breed of dragon known as the Night Fury, Hiccup manages to do, within the first ten minutes of the movie! No one believes him when he tells them he's shot down a Night Fury, of course, since Hiccup never accomplishes anything helpful to the village, so he would naturally never be able to shoot down the one dragon no one's ever seen. So after he gets shooed off to the house, he goes off looking for the felled beast. When he finally finds it, after much wandering and map-drawing and x-drawing to denote places the dragon could have fallen but clearly didn't, he decides he's going to kill it, cut out it's heart, and bring it to his father. ...With a tiny dagger. He fails, naturally, though not because of the dagger. Instead, he cuts the dragon loose of its bonds from the projectile bola that brought it down. The dragon then knocks him over, screeches, and flies off. Having both spared each other, boy and dragon appear to be at an unspoken truce.
Meanwhile, a final trip out in search of the dragon's nest before winter sets in is planned. Gobber, the village blacksmith whom Hiccup works for, is told to stay behind and train some new recruits while Stoick leads the expedition. When Hiccup returns to his home with his father, Stoick informs him that he has finally gotten his wish and is enrolled in Dragon Training, as the exact same moment that Hiccup informs him he doesn't want to kill dragons. A brief exchange occurs in which Stoick doesn't listen and Hiccup is forced to agree to Dragon Training, and father leaves son to go off in search of dragons.
Dragon training begins, and the other teenagers enrolled are extremely unimpressed that they're in a class with Hiccup. Gobber attempts to console Hiccup by informing him that the dragons will see him as sickly and weak and go after the more Viking-like teenagers (i.e., anyone but him), instead. This, naturally, does absolutely nothing for Hiccup's mood. When Gobber unleashes a Gronkle on the kids, Hiccup nearly becomes flame-broiled lunch, and Gobber informs the group of them that a dragon will always, always go for the kill.
So why didn't the Night Fury?
Curious, Hiccup wanders around the forests where he shot the dragon down in search of the beast yet again. He finds it, in a small rocky basin with a lake, and discovers that it seems incapable of flight. Breaking out his sketchbook, he draws the beast and wonders why it hasn't flown away... only to discover it's left tail fin is missing. It's unclear if Hiccup realizes that the dragon is flightless because of him here or not, but he winds up dropping his charcoal pencil and catching the creature's attention. Hiccup watches the animal to see how it will react, and in turn the dragon just watches him. It appears the Night Fury is about as curious about this funny human as the funny human is about the Night Fury.
So later in the Mead Hall, discussions about Dragon Training occur and a Dragon Manual is given to the kids. Of course there's nothing in this manual of real interest, apart from the constant phrase "extremely dangerous, kill on sight" about every dragon in existence. Night Furies, however, have no image drawn, no known size, and no known speed. The only thing written about them is that they are the "unholy offspring of lightning and death itself" and that the only hope for someone that engages this dragon is to hide and pray it doesn't find you. Funny, Hiccup found one and it seemed pretty innocently curious. So Hiccup asks Gobber about Night Furies in training the next day, and is promptly blown off. When Astrid winds up landing on top of Hiccup in her attempts to evade the Deadly Nadder they're supposed to be fighting, she has to dislodge the shield from Hiccup's arm to fend off the approaching beast. She then proceeds to tell Hiccup that their parents war is about to become theirs, and he needs to figure out which side he's on.
So Hiccup decides to see what the other side is like. He tries to feed the Night Fury in the basin, and discovers it has retractable teeth. Thus the dragon becomes "Toothless". Once retrieving the fish from Hiccup, Toothless bites it in half and regurgitates half of it into Hiccup's lap-- sharing is caring! --and forces him to eat it. Delicious. When Hiccup then smiles stupidly at the beast, he tries to mimic the gesture, and Hiccup tries to reach out and pet him. Toothless, still being a wild animal, will have none of this, and glides off to the other side of the basin.
Hiccup, naturally, follows.
After a handful of comical exchanges and boy following dragon followed by dragon following boy, Toothless mimics Hiccup who had been drawing in the dirt and the two forge an awkward friendship out of scribbles in the dirt.
That evening it is mentioned, in a story Gobber is retelling about how he lost his limbs, that a downed dragon is a dead dragon. Toothless counts as a downed dragon. Hiccup, alarmed by this realization, runs off back to his forge and makes the dragon a false tail fin out of leather and metal. He then attaches the tail fin to the dragon while distracting him with fish, and figures out a sort of haphazard way to control the fin when Toothless takes off into the air while Hiccup is still sitting on his tail. In distracting Toothless with fish, he discovered that dragons apparently hate eels. This becomes useful later, when Hiccup uses the same eel that Toothless was afraid of to coax a Hideous Zippleback back into its pen in Dragon Training.
Hiccup then makes a series of changes to the tail fin and how he attaches it to Toothless whilst figuring out all sorts of new things about dragons, like the fact that they are hilariously susceptible to catnip grass, love being scritched under the chin, and like to chase reflected light like a laser pointer. Hiccup starts to use all of this information in Dragon Training and rapidly rises to the top of his class.
Which would probably be slightly less terrible if it didn't lead to his father thinking they had things to talk about and him being named the champion of Dragon Training, the prize of which is getting to kill a Monstrous Nightmare.
So Hiccup decides he and Toothless are leaving. Except Astrid followed him, and gets "introduced" to Toothless. When she runs off to go tell the village that Hiccup is completely crazy and has been training a Night Fury, the pair of them take her on a relatively horrifying ride (by which I mean that Toothless is a brat and decided that he was having entirely more fun when Astrid was screaming bloody murder and therefore made her do so until she apologized for being a brat). Once he had mellowed out, the two teenagers and the dragon go for a delightful ride that lasts well into the night, and... accidentally involves them discovering the dragon's nest.
Whoops.
They then discover that all the dragon raids are only because they're all feeding this giant monster of a queen that lives in the bottom of a volcano. Oh shit, son. Astrid decides they need to tell Stoick about this, but Hiccup stops her because he knows that if they tell the village they'll kill Toothless. So he decides that he's going to stay, and try to convince the village that they're wrong about the dragons when he goes into the ring with the Monstrous Nightmare. So the day comes, and he goes into the ring, intent on showing everyone that the Nightmare won't hurt him if he doesn't provoke it... And Stoick kind of ruins everything by getting pissed off and spooking the creature. It goes kind of crazy, chasing Hiccup and trying very hard to kill him, and in the end it's Toothless that shows up to save the day. Except then he doesn't leave when Hiccup tells him to, so he winds up captured.
So now everything is really kind of amazingly horrible.
Stoick more or less disowns Hiccup after they fight and Hiccup discloses that they found the nest but only a dragon can get there, so Stoick has Toothless imprisoned on one of their ships and they go off to find the nest. ...despite the fact that Hiccup tried really hard to stress to his dad that the queen dragon is kind of the size of a mountain and not very much like a dragon at all and that he couldn't beat it no matter how hard he tried. So, now dragonless, fatherless, and essentially an outcast, Hiccup is sort of at a loss. And then Astrid shows up and urges him into action, wherein Hiccup realizes and admits to himself that when he came across Toothless, it wasn't that he couldn't kill him, it was that he wouldn't. And so off the crazy viking boy goes to cook up some crazy plan to save his crazy father and the rest of his village. Astrid recruits the other kids, and Hiccup teaches them all how to make friends with and ride a dragon.
In the meantime, Stoick and the others have found the nest! Joy of joys. Except after they spook all the little dragons out of the mountain, Mama Dragon shows up and is kind of pissed. And she kind of sets most of the ships on fire. ...Including the one that Toothless is still imprisoned on.
But not to fear, the kids show up to save the day! Which they do, of course. And by they I mostly mean Hiccup and Toothless once Toothless gets freed with the help of Stoick.
So after a long and involved and pretty damn epic battle scene, all looks somewhat well in that Toothless and Hiccup have coaxed the Queen down to earth after destroying her wings and lighting her partially aflame with her own flammable gas. She then hits the ground and... explodes, which was pretty awesome, except for the fact that as Hiccup and Toothless (whose tail fin has burnt to a crisp and kind of no longer exists) frantically rise away from the explosion, Hiccup gets whomped by the dragon's giant club-like tail and thrown from Toothless, unconscious. Toothless, being the loyal thing that he is, dives into the flames after the boy to rescue him. Everybody of course thinks Hiccup's dead for a while until Stoick finds Toothless and the dragon uncovers that he had him folded up in his wings, and there is a gleeful celebration of sorts (except I have no idea how they got back to Berk because most of the ships were burnt to a crisp).
Back on Berk, some undetermined amount of time later, Hiccup slowly wakes up to an excited Toothless in his house. When he goes to get up, he... discovers that his left leg from the left down is missing and has been replaced with a crude sort of peg leg. Forever a trooper, he gets up anyway and hobbles, now with a handicap to match his dragon's, to the door.
Only to discover that everyone has dragons now! And they live in the village. And there are hundreds of them. And oh Gods, where are we going to get enough fish to feed all these lizards. Anyway, happy ending is had when Hiccup is gifted with a new tail fin for Toothless and a new saddle and harness and all that and there is flying. The movie comes to an end with Hiccup retelling his initial description of Berk, saying that it snows nine months out of the year, hails the other three, the food that grows there is tough and tasteless, and the people even moreso. The only upsides were the pets-- while other people have parrots or ponies, Berk has dragons.
ABILITIES: In terms of traditional abilities, really he's only got blacksmithing. Seeing as he's been the apprentice to the village's blacksmith probably since he was about seven or eight years old, he's got something like eight or nine years of blacksmithing knowledge under his belt (this is all guesstimating with numbers, as the most definitive age we're given for him was "around fourteen" in an interview with Jay Baruchel, the actor who played his voice in the movie). This leads to a high heat tolerance, an artistic flair with metal, the ability to create both weapons and shields, and a basic know-how of how to use aforementioned weapons and shields. Seeing as most of those weapons are too big/too heavy for him to actually use, his know-how is more speculative and informational than it is an actual understanding from experience. This is however slightly contradicted by information in the book series the movie was based off of-- Hiccup is predominantly left-handed, but he goes into the sword fighting classes they take in the books using his right hand and sucks at it. He later injures his right arm to the degree he cannot use it in class, but deigns to continue going and try using his left, thus discovering that when he uses his dominant hand he's actually a very adept sword fighter. This information is strictly book-canon and not exhibited in the movie (the video game based off the movie even goes as far as to have him wield a sword with his right hand), but if at all possible I would like for him to eventually be able to remember his skill. If nothing else, perhaps he can start out with his right, and similarly to the books, for some reason be forced to use his left and do much better.
Hiccup is also extremely sarcastic, and it serves as a near-infallible defense mechanism and could kind of serve as an ability? He rarely gets upset or angry about anything, instead choosing to make dry, sardonic comments in regard of anything that should or would bother him under other circumstances. He takes criticism fairly well, though reacts with a heavy dose of his ever-present sarcasm unless it's from people he cares about (see: his father). Hiccup is also extremely smart, which is highly uncharacteristic for a Viking. They're not all completely retarded meat heads, but for the most part their thought processes consist of "Hulk Smash" and "Om Nom Nom". He's very analytical and very observant, and given he's an artist he's usually pretty good at looking at something and recreating it on paper with a charcoal pencil. He's good at maps, even if they're somewhat doodly, anatomy, and creating blueprints for creations. Moreover, he's very good at turning those blueprints into creations. He's skilled at coming up with spontaneous inventions, mostly to aid himself in Viking demeanor since he is so lacking in fighting abilities on his own. Hiccup is also a relatively open kid-- he has a tendency to say it as it is, albeit with a heavy dose of sarcasm to hide anything that might be construed as emotional. Which for the record, he is a vaguely emotional kid-- he has his moments, but really the only time that he openly expresses things outside of sarcasm is when he gets frustrated enough to be angry or upset.
This is also a sort of assumed "ability", but whether it's just to keep the movie interesting or not, it seems to me that Hiccup... doesn't sleep much. There are numerous occasions where they show him doing something late into the night only to then skip directly to the morning as though he continued to work throughout the night without stopping to sleep. Whether or not this is true or just me looking at it too hard, it seems like Hiccup is the type of kid to run on Energizer batteries that take forever to die (though one can assume that because of this, when the batteries die he sleeps for like the entire freaking day XD). Either way he's a very hard worker and he sort of hyperfocuses when he's working on something until it's done. He's very careful and particular and always ensures his work is done right the first time, since work in the forge is about all he knows he can do effectively to help out his fellows.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Sven.
BIRTHDAY LOG: Also yesplz.
DREAM: He was flying.
The feeling was so amazing, so exhilarating, so delightfully, dangerously foreign, that he didn't quite know how to feel about it. His heart was pounding from the adrenaline, his ears were ringing from the wind, his cheeks hurt from the impossibly wide smile splitting his face in two. He shifted his foot-- it was in some kind of pedal, attached to a harness and a saddle on the back of a sleek, scaly black reptile with wings. A dragon. He spoke to the beast, as though it were a familiar, a friend-- and then shifted his foot in the pedal again. They began to climb higher in the air.
He whooped and hollered, exulting his excitement to the skies and to the Gods, and he threw his arms in the air. The small piece of paper that he had drawn on-- what exactly the drawings were for, he wasn't sure --slipped away from the harness and into the air. He shouted after it, reaching to reclaim it in the air--
--his harness came unbuckled--
And suddenly he and the dragon were both plummeting toward the forests below them.
Abruptly, daylight became night, the fear in his heart became simple nervousness, and his feet were firmly on the ground instead of flailing wildly in the air. He was standing beside a lake, in the middle of a strange little basin full of trees and moss and heather and lots of rocks. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten there.
In front of him, there was a slight girl with pale, freckled skin and bright blue eyes, her blonde hair nearly glowing in the moonlight. Even in the dream, she was beautiful. He had looked away, and she had struck out like a snake and punched his arm. When he flinched, she groused at him.
"That's for kidnapping me," she said. The light from the moon above them glinted off her teeth slightly, and the boy realized with faint annoyance that she was taller than him.
He glanced over his shoulder, rubbing his arm, and shrugged at the same dragon he had fallen from just before. As he turned back around, the girl was pushing her hair out of her face and moving toward him again. He flinched--
Only to be met with her hand, fisted loosely around his shirt front, and her lips briefly grazing his cheek. His eyes went wide, and she pulled away to stare at the earth between their feet. His breath left him.
"That's for... everything else," she added, and while he stood there dumbstruck she turned and ran off.
The next thing he knew he was on his backside in a dark hall, with light from the sun clearly spilling in the partially-open narrow door ahead of him. A wide, giant of a man was standing before him, and most of what was visible was the silhouette of his shoulders, his arms, and a strange, familiar yet foreign helmet atop his head. The entirety of the boy's form was chilled with dread and fear, like someone had doused him with a bucket of frigid ocean water.
"You've thrown your lot in with them," the man said, voice dripping with an angry sort of betrayal that made the boy's heart wrench painfully in his chest. "You're not a Viking--" That statement stung more than the tone alone. "--You're not my son."
The boy's chest heaved as he struggled to inhale, watching as the man who was apparently his father stormed out of the hall and slammed the door shut behind him. It bounced, and left a stripe of light across his face as he tried to regain his breath.
Inside his cocoon, Sven's breath hitched around the sticky liquid surrounding him and he choked.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: I think this goes without saying, but none of this is right or familiar at all. Yeah, I know there's the whole 'no memories' thing, but what I have was so different... I mean, again, I guess it goes without saying, we're clearly all somewhere very far away from home with no way of getting home because I guess most of us don't even really know what home is. Which is pretty awful, really.
I dunno, maybe I've always wanted to be a tree-dweller. I guess I could get used to living in a tree. It could be worse. Maybe. Probably.
So let's go with that-- assume I always wanted to be a tree-dweller. Ever since I was little. I lived somewhere without a lot of-- no, I clearly lived somewhere with quite a few trees, I saw that much. Lots of trees. Maybe I just really liked trees. So I really liked trees and I wanted to live in one. So I got my wish, now! It just cost me all of my memories of who I am and where I come from.
Yeah, that's looking a lot more like a "maybe" on the "it could be worse" scale.
ASPIRATIONS: I'd like for him to be able to remember his ability as a blacksmith's apprentice, and if possible I would love to be able to parallel a few things that happened in the books but not in the film (i.e., the fact that he's pretty good left-handed with a sword). Otherwise, I've just been itching to join this game for ages and never found a muse that quite worked for it before Hiccup. I'm open to any and all plotting-stuff, but mostly I just want a game like the 'sphere to play him in. (:
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Juli.
LOCATION/TIME ZONE: Florida/EST.
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Not Applicable.
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III.
SERIES: How to Train Your Dragon (Film; some information drawn from the book series).
RESERVED: No.
WISHLIST: No.
PERSONALITY: Hiccup is kind of a snark fairy. He's sarcastic and has a sense of humor drier than the Sahara, though it's largely in his own defense. See, he's kind of spent the better part of his life feeling like nothing more than an annoyance and a failure to the entirety of his village. His family, what would be his friends, even the sheep probably rolled their eyes at him fairly regularly. But he's okay with that, for the most part-- he'll just roll his eyes back and spat some sort of sardonic reply and wander off to doodle trees in charcoal. Inwardly, Hiccup hates being a burden, but given his physical strength, or... very stark lack thereof, and lack of brutish thought process, he's sort of resigned himself to his fate of being the Worst Viking Ever. Despite his resignation, he spends tireless hours and days and years of his life trying to prove himself to the village-- more than anything else, he wants to be accepted. He hides it pretty well, for a kid severely lacking in affection and attention, but he does have a habit of acting out.
...and by acting out, I mean he regularly (accidentally!) sets the village on fire trying to show his dad he can be awesome.
That said, the kid does have a fuse. It's a very slow burn, but he does get frustrated and he will snap at people, it just takes the better part of forever for it to actually happen. He's very loyal, despite the cold shoulder he receives in return for his loyalty, and he'd never hesitate to help someone out if he thought he actually could. Given most Vikings don't need help unless they're being chased by an army of angry Gronkles, Hiccup rarely has the chance to help his fellows out. He puts in a good amount of help working at the blacksmith shop in the village, though-- he's been an assistant to Gobber the Belch since he was little (littler), and while most of the tools the Vikings in the village use are easily bigger and heavier than Hiccup himself, he's a pretty good hand at the smithy. He's very creative and inventive, and while he tends to get an irritated eyeroll out of his fellow Vikings for it, he's attempted to compensate for his inability to use traditional Viking weapons by creating devices to help him. This proves that not only is he a tactical thinker, but he's good at turning his artistic impulses into useful, if only to him, creations.
Likely due to the fact that he's spent the majority of his life as such, Hiccup is something of a loner. He doesn't dislike people or companionship-- quite the opposite, actually --but he's awkward and not-quite shy and sure as hell doesn't know how to behave if people actually decide he's worth their time. This is most noticeable when he starts excelling in Dragon Training and the other Viking children start idolizing him and paying attention to him-- he almost never stays with them and holds a conversation, he tends to duck away and find an excuse to not deal with the clamor. This could be blamed on the fact that he had a dragon to take care of and dragons are a million and seventeen times cooler than two-faced Viking brats, but more likely is due to the fact that even though he's sought after the attention of his fellow Vikings for years, Hiccup doesn't really know what to do with the attention once he's started receiving it.
It's hard to say that Hiccup dislikes himself-- he certainly doesn't have very high self-esteem, but he's not outright self-hating, either. He doesn't hesitate to snark at himself in a self-deprecating fashion when he does something wrong-- or "wrong" in the eyes of his village, at least --but he's not an emo kid. He rolls with the punches amazingly well, taking things like being told his father doesn't hate what he looks like, but what's inside of him with little more than an irritable sulk and a sarcastic remark. This is why his sarcasm is his defense-- rather than let such comments hurt him, he bounces them off with a roll of his eyes and something dry and vaguely witty and moves on. He's... an oddly sensitive teenage boy, but constantly bleeds sarcasm so it's hard to tell unless you can see through it and figure out what he's actually trying to say.
TIMELINE: Post-Movie. (:
BACKGROUND: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is the son of Stoick the Vast (O Hear His Name and Tremble, Ugh Ugh), Chief of the Hairy Hooligan tribe of Vikings that reside on the frozen little island of Berk. According to Hiccup, Berk is "twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death", as well as "located solidly on the veridian of misery". Which is to say, it's a frozen rock in the middle of a frozen ocean. His village has been standing for seven generations, buuut because they're constantly plagued by dragon raids and attacks, all the houses and buildings are new. Because what is having fireproof building supplies. The dragon raids, in fact, are what introduce the plot and pretty much everything to the story. See, Berk has for about three hundred years had problems with pests. Large, flying, fire-breathing reptilian pests, in fact. They raid the village at night and steal food, and instead of leaving the village, the Vikings just... fight and kill the dragons and tend to get half their village destroyed on at least a weekly basis.
Hiccup is sort of the village idiot, except reversed. Whereas most of the Vikings are stubborn and stupid and too deeply-rooted in their traditions to think logically or change anything in their ways, Hiccup is... different. For starters, he's tiny and scrawny and not at all strong, he can't wield any of the weapons the other Vikings use effectively, and he's just strange. His father claims he has the attention span of a sparrow, and once when he took Hiccup out fishing the boy went hunting for trolls. Hiccup is also the blacksmith's apprentice, so during dragon raids he is only ever really allowed outside if he's on his way to the smithy. Because if he's outside otherwise he winds up being part or most of the reason that half of the village winds up in flames.
Which, after actually shooting down the rarest and most intelligent breed of dragon known as the Night Fury, Hiccup manages to do, within the first ten minutes of the movie! No one believes him when he tells them he's shot down a Night Fury, of course, since Hiccup never accomplishes anything helpful to the village, so he would naturally never be able to shoot down the one dragon no one's ever seen. So after he gets shooed off to the house, he goes off looking for the felled beast. When he finally finds it, after much wandering and map-drawing and x-drawing to denote places the dragon could have fallen but clearly didn't, he decides he's going to kill it, cut out it's heart, and bring it to his father. ...With a tiny dagger. He fails, naturally, though not because of the dagger. Instead, he cuts the dragon loose of its bonds from the projectile bola that brought it down. The dragon then knocks him over, screeches, and flies off. Having both spared each other, boy and dragon appear to be at an unspoken truce.
Meanwhile, a final trip out in search of the dragon's nest before winter sets in is planned. Gobber, the village blacksmith whom Hiccup works for, is told to stay behind and train some new recruits while Stoick leads the expedition. When Hiccup returns to his home with his father, Stoick informs him that he has finally gotten his wish and is enrolled in Dragon Training, as the exact same moment that Hiccup informs him he doesn't want to kill dragons. A brief exchange occurs in which Stoick doesn't listen and Hiccup is forced to agree to Dragon Training, and father leaves son to go off in search of dragons.
Dragon training begins, and the other teenagers enrolled are extremely unimpressed that they're in a class with Hiccup. Gobber attempts to console Hiccup by informing him that the dragons will see him as sickly and weak and go after the more Viking-like teenagers (i.e., anyone but him), instead. This, naturally, does absolutely nothing for Hiccup's mood. When Gobber unleashes a Gronkle on the kids, Hiccup nearly becomes flame-broiled lunch, and Gobber informs the group of them that a dragon will always, always go for the kill.
So why didn't the Night Fury?
Curious, Hiccup wanders around the forests where he shot the dragon down in search of the beast yet again. He finds it, in a small rocky basin with a lake, and discovers that it seems incapable of flight. Breaking out his sketchbook, he draws the beast and wonders why it hasn't flown away... only to discover it's left tail fin is missing. It's unclear if Hiccup realizes that the dragon is flightless because of him here or not, but he winds up dropping his charcoal pencil and catching the creature's attention. Hiccup watches the animal to see how it will react, and in turn the dragon just watches him. It appears the Night Fury is about as curious about this funny human as the funny human is about the Night Fury.
So later in the Mead Hall, discussions about Dragon Training occur and a Dragon Manual is given to the kids. Of course there's nothing in this manual of real interest, apart from the constant phrase "extremely dangerous, kill on sight" about every dragon in existence. Night Furies, however, have no image drawn, no known size, and no known speed. The only thing written about them is that they are the "unholy offspring of lightning and death itself" and that the only hope for someone that engages this dragon is to hide and pray it doesn't find you. Funny, Hiccup found one and it seemed pretty innocently curious. So Hiccup asks Gobber about Night Furies in training the next day, and is promptly blown off. When Astrid winds up landing on top of Hiccup in her attempts to evade the Deadly Nadder they're supposed to be fighting, she has to dislodge the shield from Hiccup's arm to fend off the approaching beast. She then proceeds to tell Hiccup that their parents war is about to become theirs, and he needs to figure out which side he's on.
So Hiccup decides to see what the other side is like. He tries to feed the Night Fury in the basin, and discovers it has retractable teeth. Thus the dragon becomes "Toothless". Once retrieving the fish from Hiccup, Toothless bites it in half and regurgitates half of it into Hiccup's lap-- sharing is caring! --and forces him to eat it. Delicious. When Hiccup then smiles stupidly at the beast, he tries to mimic the gesture, and Hiccup tries to reach out and pet him. Toothless, still being a wild animal, will have none of this, and glides off to the other side of the basin.
Hiccup, naturally, follows.
After a handful of comical exchanges and boy following dragon followed by dragon following boy, Toothless mimics Hiccup who had been drawing in the dirt and the two forge an awkward friendship out of scribbles in the dirt.
That evening it is mentioned, in a story Gobber is retelling about how he lost his limbs, that a downed dragon is a dead dragon. Toothless counts as a downed dragon. Hiccup, alarmed by this realization, runs off back to his forge and makes the dragon a false tail fin out of leather and metal. He then attaches the tail fin to the dragon while distracting him with fish, and figures out a sort of haphazard way to control the fin when Toothless takes off into the air while Hiccup is still sitting on his tail. In distracting Toothless with fish, he discovered that dragons apparently hate eels. This becomes useful later, when Hiccup uses the same eel that Toothless was afraid of to coax a Hideous Zippleback back into its pen in Dragon Training.
Hiccup then makes a series of changes to the tail fin and how he attaches it to Toothless whilst figuring out all sorts of new things about dragons, like the fact that they are hilariously susceptible to catnip grass, love being scritched under the chin, and like to chase reflected light like a laser pointer. Hiccup starts to use all of this information in Dragon Training and rapidly rises to the top of his class.
Which would probably be slightly less terrible if it didn't lead to his father thinking they had things to talk about and him being named the champion of Dragon Training, the prize of which is getting to kill a Monstrous Nightmare.
So Hiccup decides he and Toothless are leaving. Except Astrid followed him, and gets "introduced" to Toothless. When she runs off to go tell the village that Hiccup is completely crazy and has been training a Night Fury, the pair of them take her on a relatively horrifying ride (by which I mean that Toothless is a brat and decided that he was having entirely more fun when Astrid was screaming bloody murder and therefore made her do so until she apologized for being a brat). Once he had mellowed out, the two teenagers and the dragon go for a delightful ride that lasts well into the night, and... accidentally involves them discovering the dragon's nest.
Whoops.
They then discover that all the dragon raids are only because they're all feeding this giant monster of a queen that lives in the bottom of a volcano. Oh shit, son. Astrid decides they need to tell Stoick about this, but Hiccup stops her because he knows that if they tell the village they'll kill Toothless. So he decides that he's going to stay, and try to convince the village that they're wrong about the dragons when he goes into the ring with the Monstrous Nightmare. So the day comes, and he goes into the ring, intent on showing everyone that the Nightmare won't hurt him if he doesn't provoke it... And Stoick kind of ruins everything by getting pissed off and spooking the creature. It goes kind of crazy, chasing Hiccup and trying very hard to kill him, and in the end it's Toothless that shows up to save the day. Except then he doesn't leave when Hiccup tells him to, so he winds up captured.
So now everything is really kind of amazingly horrible.
Stoick more or less disowns Hiccup after they fight and Hiccup discloses that they found the nest but only a dragon can get there, so Stoick has Toothless imprisoned on one of their ships and they go off to find the nest. ...despite the fact that Hiccup tried really hard to stress to his dad that the queen dragon is kind of the size of a mountain and not very much like a dragon at all and that he couldn't beat it no matter how hard he tried. So, now dragonless, fatherless, and essentially an outcast, Hiccup is sort of at a loss. And then Astrid shows up and urges him into action, wherein Hiccup realizes and admits to himself that when he came across Toothless, it wasn't that he couldn't kill him, it was that he wouldn't. And so off the crazy viking boy goes to cook up some crazy plan to save his crazy father and the rest of his village. Astrid recruits the other kids, and Hiccup teaches them all how to make friends with and ride a dragon.
In the meantime, Stoick and the others have found the nest! Joy of joys. Except after they spook all the little dragons out of the mountain, Mama Dragon shows up and is kind of pissed. And she kind of sets most of the ships on fire. ...Including the one that Toothless is still imprisoned on.
But not to fear, the kids show up to save the day! Which they do, of course. And by they I mostly mean Hiccup and Toothless once Toothless gets freed with the help of Stoick.
So after a long and involved and pretty damn epic battle scene, all looks somewhat well in that Toothless and Hiccup have coaxed the Queen down to earth after destroying her wings and lighting her partially aflame with her own flammable gas. She then hits the ground and... explodes, which was pretty awesome, except for the fact that as Hiccup and Toothless (whose tail fin has burnt to a crisp and kind of no longer exists) frantically rise away from the explosion, Hiccup gets whomped by the dragon's giant club-like tail and thrown from Toothless, unconscious. Toothless, being the loyal thing that he is, dives into the flames after the boy to rescue him. Everybody of course thinks Hiccup's dead for a while until Stoick finds Toothless and the dragon uncovers that he had him folded up in his wings, and there is a gleeful celebration of sorts (except I have no idea how they got back to Berk because most of the ships were burnt to a crisp).
Back on Berk, some undetermined amount of time later, Hiccup slowly wakes up to an excited Toothless in his house. When he goes to get up, he... discovers that his left leg from the left down is missing and has been replaced with a crude sort of peg leg. Forever a trooper, he gets up anyway and hobbles, now with a handicap to match his dragon's, to the door.
Only to discover that everyone has dragons now! And they live in the village. And there are hundreds of them. And oh Gods, where are we going to get enough fish to feed all these lizards. Anyway, happy ending is had when Hiccup is gifted with a new tail fin for Toothless and a new saddle and harness and all that and there is flying. The movie comes to an end with Hiccup retelling his initial description of Berk, saying that it snows nine months out of the year, hails the other three, the food that grows there is tough and tasteless, and the people even moreso. The only upsides were the pets-- while other people have parrots or ponies, Berk has dragons.
ABILITIES: In terms of traditional abilities, really he's only got blacksmithing. Seeing as he's been the apprentice to the village's blacksmith probably since he was about seven or eight years old, he's got something like eight or nine years of blacksmithing knowledge under his belt (this is all guesstimating with numbers, as the most definitive age we're given for him was "around fourteen" in an interview with Jay Baruchel, the actor who played his voice in the movie). This leads to a high heat tolerance, an artistic flair with metal, the ability to create both weapons and shields, and a basic know-how of how to use aforementioned weapons and shields. Seeing as most of those weapons are too big/too heavy for him to actually use, his know-how is more speculative and informational than it is an actual understanding from experience. This is however slightly contradicted by information in the book series the movie was based off of-- Hiccup is predominantly left-handed, but he goes into the sword fighting classes they take in the books using his right hand and sucks at it. He later injures his right arm to the degree he cannot use it in class, but deigns to continue going and try using his left, thus discovering that when he uses his dominant hand he's actually a very adept sword fighter. This information is strictly book-canon and not exhibited in the movie (the video game based off the movie even goes as far as to have him wield a sword with his right hand), but if at all possible I would like for him to eventually be able to remember his skill. If nothing else, perhaps he can start out with his right, and similarly to the books, for some reason be forced to use his left and do much better.
Hiccup is also extremely sarcastic, and it serves as a near-infallible defense mechanism and could kind of serve as an ability? He rarely gets upset or angry about anything, instead choosing to make dry, sardonic comments in regard of anything that should or would bother him under other circumstances. He takes criticism fairly well, though reacts with a heavy dose of his ever-present sarcasm unless it's from people he cares about (see: his father). Hiccup is also extremely smart, which is highly uncharacteristic for a Viking. They're not all completely retarded meat heads, but for the most part their thought processes consist of "Hulk Smash" and "Om Nom Nom". He's very analytical and very observant, and given he's an artist he's usually pretty good at looking at something and recreating it on paper with a charcoal pencil. He's good at maps, even if they're somewhat doodly, anatomy, and creating blueprints for creations. Moreover, he's very good at turning those blueprints into creations. He's skilled at coming up with spontaneous inventions, mostly to aid himself in Viking demeanor since he is so lacking in fighting abilities on his own. Hiccup is also a relatively open kid-- he has a tendency to say it as it is, albeit with a heavy dose of sarcasm to hide anything that might be construed as emotional. Which for the record, he is a vaguely emotional kid-- he has his moments, but really the only time that he openly expresses things outside of sarcasm is when he gets frustrated enough to be angry or upset.
This is also a sort of assumed "ability", but whether it's just to keep the movie interesting or not, it seems to me that Hiccup... doesn't sleep much. There are numerous occasions where they show him doing something late into the night only to then skip directly to the morning as though he continued to work throughout the night without stopping to sleep. Whether or not this is true or just me looking at it too hard, it seems like Hiccup is the type of kid to run on Energizer batteries that take forever to die (though one can assume that because of this, when the batteries die he sleeps for like the entire freaking day XD). Either way he's a very hard worker and he sort of hyperfocuses when he's working on something until it's done. He's very careful and particular and always ensures his work is done right the first time, since work in the forge is about all he knows he can do effectively to help out his fellows.
GAME INFO
EDENSPHERE NAME: Sven.
BIRTHDAY LOG: Also yesplz.
DREAM: He was flying.
The feeling was so amazing, so exhilarating, so delightfully, dangerously foreign, that he didn't quite know how to feel about it. His heart was pounding from the adrenaline, his ears were ringing from the wind, his cheeks hurt from the impossibly wide smile splitting his face in two. He shifted his foot-- it was in some kind of pedal, attached to a harness and a saddle on the back of a sleek, scaly black reptile with wings. A dragon. He spoke to the beast, as though it were a familiar, a friend-- and then shifted his foot in the pedal again. They began to climb higher in the air.
He whooped and hollered, exulting his excitement to the skies and to the Gods, and he threw his arms in the air. The small piece of paper that he had drawn on-- what exactly the drawings were for, he wasn't sure --slipped away from the harness and into the air. He shouted after it, reaching to reclaim it in the air--
--his harness came unbuckled--
And suddenly he and the dragon were both plummeting toward the forests below them.
Abruptly, daylight became night, the fear in his heart became simple nervousness, and his feet were firmly on the ground instead of flailing wildly in the air. He was standing beside a lake, in the middle of a strange little basin full of trees and moss and heather and lots of rocks. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten there.
In front of him, there was a slight girl with pale, freckled skin and bright blue eyes, her blonde hair nearly glowing in the moonlight. Even in the dream, she was beautiful. He had looked away, and she had struck out like a snake and punched his arm. When he flinched, she groused at him.
"That's for kidnapping me," she said. The light from the moon above them glinted off her teeth slightly, and the boy realized with faint annoyance that she was taller than him.
He glanced over his shoulder, rubbing his arm, and shrugged at the same dragon he had fallen from just before. As he turned back around, the girl was pushing her hair out of her face and moving toward him again. He flinched--
Only to be met with her hand, fisted loosely around his shirt front, and her lips briefly grazing his cheek. His eyes went wide, and she pulled away to stare at the earth between their feet. His breath left him.
"That's for... everything else," she added, and while he stood there dumbstruck she turned and ran off.
The next thing he knew he was on his backside in a dark hall, with light from the sun clearly spilling in the partially-open narrow door ahead of him. A wide, giant of a man was standing before him, and most of what was visible was the silhouette of his shoulders, his arms, and a strange, familiar yet foreign helmet atop his head. The entirety of the boy's form was chilled with dread and fear, like someone had doused him with a bucket of frigid ocean water.
"You've thrown your lot in with them," the man said, voice dripping with an angry sort of betrayal that made the boy's heart wrench painfully in his chest. "You're not a Viking--" That statement stung more than the tone alone. "--You're not my son."
The boy's chest heaved as he struggled to inhale, watching as the man who was apparently his father stormed out of the hall and slammed the door shut behind him. It bounced, and left a stripe of light across his face as he tried to regain his breath.
Inside his cocoon, Sven's breath hitched around the sticky liquid surrounding him and he choked.
JOURNAL SAMPLE: I think this goes without saying, but none of this is right or familiar at all. Yeah, I know there's the whole 'no memories' thing, but what I have was so different... I mean, again, I guess it goes without saying, we're clearly all somewhere very far away from home with no way of getting home because I guess most of us don't even really know what home is. Which is pretty awful, really.
I dunno, maybe I've always wanted to be a tree-dweller. I guess I could get used to living in a tree. It could be worse. Maybe. Probably.
So let's go with that-- assume I always wanted to be a tree-dweller. Ever since I was little. I lived somewhere without a lot of-- no, I clearly lived somewhere with quite a few trees, I saw that much. Lots of trees. Maybe I just really liked trees. So I really liked trees and I wanted to live in one. So I got my wish, now! It just cost me all of my memories of who I am and where I come from.
Yeah, that's looking a lot more like a "maybe" on the "it could be worse" scale.
ASPIRATIONS: I'd like for him to be able to remember his ability as a blacksmith's apprentice, and if possible I would love to be able to parallel a few things that happened in the books but not in the film (i.e., the fact that he's pretty good left-handed with a sword). Otherwise, I've just been itching to join this game for ages and never found a muse that quite worked for it before Hiccup. I'm open to any and all plotting-stuff, but mostly I just want a game like the 'sphere to play him in. (: